Probabilistic Ontologies for Efficient Resource Sharing in Semantic Web Services

Abstract

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a key technology to support interoperability among data and processing resources. Semantic interoperability requires mapping between vocabularies of independently developed resources, a task fraught with uncertainty. Probabilistic ontologies enable representation of knowledge in domains characterized by uncertainty. As such, they promise to improve the quality of service descriptions, enable more thorough analysis of service composition opportunities, and provide a theoretically sound methodology for semantic mapping under uncertainty. This paper defines probabilistic ontologies, discusses their application to SOA, and presents a conceptual scheme for using a federation of ontologies (with both common and probabilistic ontologies) as a semantic mapping tool for service oriented information exchange systems with different levels of service descriptions (including legacy and probabilistic enabled descriptions).